An idea...
Point is, I always have fun doing sites and have been itching for another. It occurred to me the other day that there really aren’t (please tell me if there are!) any Remus/Sirius sites out there. And by that I mean sites that are devoted to R/S fanfics, but aren’t straight up blogs or fanlistings. If there are some I missed, just let me know.
What I’m looking for is a stand-alone site (ie not LJ or something) that hosts R/S fics and a community. Sort of like FF.net but for R/S and more interactive. I found a Harry Potter fanfic site, but it seems mainly hetero-centric and that’s it. I know there is Azkaban’s Lair, but it’s not quite what I had in mind.
If there really aren’t any, I was considering starting one. God knows I waste enough of my time writing/reading R/S. I could easily justify spending time on a website too.
The basic idea I had was a more interactive website. You could post your fics (and art or whatever), but also links to your LJ or where ever else you posted it. Part of it would be an archive of the fics and since an R/S fan would be running it we know that LJ or whoever wouldn’t suddenly try to shut it down or something dumb because its about omggays!.
Basically, I’m thinking a forum format rather than a blog one. You could post your fics as a thread and easily get comments and all that. But you could also get Beta’s there, post challenges and contests, and ask questions about canon and such. I like blogs, but the more I think about it, the more a forum format could really work for this.
I do understand that it would also just be “ugh one more place to post”, but I think we could really make it enjoyable. While it would be mainly R/S, it would obviously be a bit more lenient and you could post other fics as well. Maybe even have a section for original fics, I’m sure some of us write them. Since it would be a forum, there would also be a place to discuss the books, movies, and non Harry Potter things (gasp, are there?) in life. Yeah, again it’s a bit like LJ, but I think that there are enough of us that we could really build up a little community and a forum format would work so much better than blog. I think eventually prolific members could even get their own subforum that would house all their fics and gain moderator status over it.
I actually thought of how I wished we had a forum earlier this month. I had a question about the Prank and I KNOW I saw someone ask it a couple of weeks before, I just wanted to reread the answers. But I couldn’t for the life of me find it. I thought it would be so much easier if I could narrow down the posts or something. With a forum I could just go to like the “Canon Questions” section and it would be right there! A thread with Canon FAQ’s could even be sticked at the top.
With a forum format fics would also have more “staying power” as it were. Blog format is nice, but once a few people have posted above you, you fall into the abyss. I think this is especially hard for new writers. I know I sometimes check the journals of my fav writers to see if I’ve missed them update, but a new or one-time writer who falls off of the main page pretty much has no hope of being found again. And even if someone finds it and leaves you a nice comment, you’re still gone. But in a forum if someone comments, you’ll bump back to the top and people will see your fic all over again! And a lot of times, if you see that a lot of people have commented, you might be more inclined to read a fic you might otherwise ignore.
A friend asked me just yesterday how many people read my fics, and I couldn’t answer. I know how many comment, but I have no idea beyond that. A forum would at least show you how many people have clicked on your story, so you’d have some idea of your audience size.
It would also be nice to just have a forum where we can talk about our fics, and R/S love, and Harry Potter without idiots coming in and flaming us for being nasty perverts.
Anyway, the more I write about this the more positive things I see about a forum format. So I’ll just wrap this up:
Would anyone be at all interested in this? Obviously, I don’t expect you to do any webpage design or crap like that. A forum (any website actually) is nothing without people in it. So if I did this, would anybody out there actually start posting in it and using it? You, of course, would have to understand that it will probably start off a bit slow at first, but I really believe that there are enough of us to make it sizeable enough to have fun with and if we were to just keep plugging away at it, in a few months it could really take off into something we R/S fans can be proud to have.
Comments? Encouragement? Discouragement? Plain old couragement?